By now just about everybody knows that Alex Trebek sleeps in the nude. The naked truth was revealed after Trebek injured himself in a San Francisco hotel, trying to chase a thief that broke into his room. In the Jeopardy host’s own words, “I realized immediately someone had been in the room. I put on my underwear and ran down the hall to see if I could find her.”
Of course, this raises the answer, “Google,” to that all important question: “What was Alex Trebek doing in a San Francisco hotel?” He had come to host the International Geography Bee, and what better place to host it than the Googleplex in Mountain View. After all, this is the place that brought Google Earth to the world, and gave students everywhere a chance to spruce up their geography skills by soaring around the planet to the most remote corners of the globe, from Fucking, Austria, to Hell, Norway, to Secret Town California, to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, Wales (the four L’s in the middle are not a typo).
Americans are infamously poor at geography, with a study conducted in the wake of Hurricane Katrina showing that only about half could find Mississippi on a map, and only one-third could find Louisiana. Of course, Australians have known this for a long time.
That’s why the finalists, kids aged 11 to 16, were from Taiwan, Russia, and Canada, our friendly neighbor to the south. In the end, the Russians won, but the U.S. still has one great advantage. We can always use our own homegrown Google to figure out if California is on the East Coast or the West.
